It’s no oil painting from the front – but a hidden early mural by elusive street artist Banksy could push up the price of this end-of-terrace, two-bedroom semi in Bristol when it comes up for auction with a guide price of £250,000-£300,000.
Back in 1999, Banksy was a friend of the then owner of this property who let the artist hand paint his Slick on Brick artwork, depicting a monkey plunging a detonator to blow the door off a safe, on the outside wall of his garage/workshop.
A year later the mural was covered over in magnolia paint by a disapproving neighbour who claimed the picture frightened his young daughter. After the plain wall attracted less desirable street-art tags, the current owner, Christine Prior, decided that a large mural would solve the problem of unwanted graffiti as well as please children attending the school.
Prior set up the community project and commissioned Bristol street artist Robert del Naja, known as 3D, to design an artwork. Del Naja, credited with being the spiritual leader of the street art scene in Bristol, is a founding member of the band Massive Attack and has been an active street artist since his teenage years alongside other members of The Wild Bunch crew.
Children from the nearby Felix Road Adventure Playground scheme were invited to help the colour blind 3D paint in his mural, which features cartoon characters including Rastamouse and Kung Fu Panda. This mural is now starting to peel away revealing the Banksy work underneath.
Prior is now selling the home which, mural or no mural, is expected to fetch at least £250,000 given that it is in good decorative order, has a well-stocked pretty garden and sits on a sizeable plot with room for expansion.
But with the rising value of Banksy’s work, art experts have estimated his hidden painting alone could be worth about £400,000 if it is restored in the way other examples of his work have been.
Only recently one of Banksy’s most iconic works, Snorting Copper, which appeared in Shoreditch in east London 12 years ago, was painstakingly restored. Soon after its initial appearance the infamous piece of street art, which shows a police officer bent over to sniff a line of cocaine, was jet painted over by the local council who deemed it to be vandalism, and later hidden behind plywood.
Thought to have been lost forever, it was rediscovered a decade later. The restoration involved extracting the two-ton wall in one section and transporting it for analysis, plus 12 weeks of work by a team of 11 people to remove layers of paint and repair the damage, before reinstating it in its original spot. The fact it had been painted and covered over had ironically preserved and protected it, according to the restorers. The same may be true for Slick on Brick if anyone is up for restoring the original.
It will be interesting to see how many bidders at next week’s auction are there for the house and how many are willing to push up the price to secure the hidden artwork. But one dilemma facing the latter will be whether to destroy 3D’s mural in order to get at the Banksy, especially as there are those in the art world who subscribe to the theory that 3D and Banksy are one and the same man.
The house in Normanby Road, Easton, Bristol, is up for auction by Auction House at 7.00pm on Thursday 2 November 2017 at Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol.
